August 30, 2011

K-State Libraries offer automated recommendation service

Recommendations are ubiquitous in the world in which we shop with Amazon, watch movies with Netflix and connect with our friends on Facebook. Automated suggestions for scholarshly research were only a matter of time.

K-State Libraries now offers recommendations for scholarly journal articles through a service called Get It Recommends. This service, added to the Libraries' Get It menu, can suggest other items related to the article you are trying to find. Simply click the Get It button next to the recommended article to find full text or use the Save Citations feature to add a recommended article's citation to your RefWorks or EndNote account. View a sample Get It menu to see how additional articles appear.

Many retail and social recommendation services base their suggestions on customers' behaviors while buying, watching, or socializing online. Amazon's Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought section is an excellent example. The item you are viewing exists within a network of items other customers have purchased. The strength of these network connections influences which items Amazon suggests to you while you shop.

This retail method of creating and presenting suggestions is analogous to the way Get It Recommends creates and presents scholarly article recommendations. Researchers around the world create relationships between and among articles by requesting and using them through library services like the Get It menu. The more frequently researchers request the same two or more articles within the same session, the stronger the relationship between or among the articles. Get It Recommends mines these relationships to create scholarly article recommendations. When a requested article does not have strong relationships with other articles, Get It Recommends does not display any recommendations.

Get It Recommends is powered by Ex Libris's bX Recommender Service. bX is based on research conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratories by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel.